A new magazine has entered the Central European literary firmament, The Continental Literary Magazine, a quarterly print magazine with an excellent website brought out by the Petőfi Cultural Agency. Their focus is bringing Hungarian and Central European writing into English and is led by editor-in-chief Sándor Jászberényi, whose own fiction has been published extensively in […]
“…with the index finger of my left hand I write in the grime on the windows on the even-numbered side, ‘Yes Vico! No Vice!’, and with my right arm I sweep up the beauties standing on the odd-numbered side and whisper obscenities in their ears. And when I get bored of this, with both hands […]
The author of Snow White and Russian Red has a new novel coming out in English translation courtesy of Deep Vellum Publishing and translator Benjamin Paloff. Titled Honey, I Killed The Cats, Dorota Masłowska’s shreds modern-day consumer capitalist (etc.) life from its opening pages and you can read its first two chapters in Saturday European […]
“Come, precious ones, let’s cry together before I go. I will be back with you as soon as I can. No, I won’t stay; they don’t want me here anymore. Władzia, dear, keep the peace, won’t you? Don’t let anybody hit Zosia. And please don’t fight amongst yourselves. I will miss you too…” From the […]
“Kitchen full of black aunties sighed, outraged with Grandma’s lack of respect for the written word and the bloody stamp in the corner of the page. Nobody questioned the war death. She was the only one who put her foot down.” From the short story “Tola” by poet and short story writer Mirka Szychowiak, translated […]
“The stout man looked at Israel for the first time since he’d walked into the restaurant. He placed his glass on the table and said, ‘You should go away. You aren’t suited for this country and you don’t like it. Dov loves it. Too bad he’ll come to such a stupid end.’ He gazed into […]
The Paris Review has an article on great Polish science-fiction writer Stanisław Lem’s view of the future (and, of course, present) of humanity entitled “The Future According to Stanisław Lem”. The occasion is the screen adaptation of Lem’s 1971 novella The Futurological Congress, translated into English by Michael Kandel, into a film called The Congress […]
The latest issue of Asymptote is out with an awesome Latin America Fiction Feature, including work by Sergio Chejfec, Cristina Peri Rossi, Lina Meruane and Julián Herbert as well as an essay by César Aira on Osvaldo Lamborghini. The esteemed translators bringing this work into English include many who have worked with B O D […]
Author of Kafka: the Decisive Years, Reiner Stach, has a great though not exactly heartwarming article in the New Statesman on how The Trial seems to relate to many of today’s wonderful extrajudicial tendencies that are coming from the freedom-loving world and that are keeping us so wonderfully safe and secure: “Death by data: how […]
“On Thursday, as always, I was awakened by the radio. Listening to the news while brushing my teeth— I have a radio right in my bathroom— I heard about the flood in the state of Pueblo, Mexico in which two thousand people had drowned. Now, I don’t know if that was the first time this […]
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